Poco a Poco Morendo
by wise guys and thugs
Summary: On Earth I lived as Magdalena, a girl with a professor mother and a violinist father, blessed with a musical mind. When I fell asleep, and the family with the dark hair and dark eyes woke into existence, I lived as Uchiha Sasuke. SI/OC of a young music prodigy that has recurring dreams of living as Sasuke in the Elemental Nations.
1. Chapter 1: Allegro con brio

_Allegro con brio_

I've had the dreams for as long as I can remember. This is the first time I've decided to pen them down.

Sorry, I lied. When I was young-between the ages of two and three-I drew my dreams often. My parents initially treated my drawings (and I use this word very lightly. Mishmashes of stick figures scribbled in tacky crayon can hardly be considered art) with indulgent looks and lighthearted praises on my creativity.

I stopped the drawings when I turned four. The responses they'd garnered by then had turned from "creative" to "concerning". I am not a genius, and I know I will never have the potential to become one, but even my childish mind recognized uneasiness when I saw it. My older brother had been wicked intelligent since the day he was born-he was tested with an IQ of somewhere in the 190s. The idea of even coming close to that left my mind reeling. I was, at best, adaptable, or perspicacious, but never prodigious. I'd been living two lives in the space of one, you see, so by the time I turned four I had been already gifted with the burden of an eight-year-old psyche.

The wisdom of a second grader certainly wasn't prodigious, but it was enough for me to recognize the melancholy that glinted in my mama's eyes when I presented her the pictures I'd drawn of my other family. Her smile was strained when she looked at the black hair of my other mother, which was a stark discordance against the sandy blonde of her own. Mama had pinned it on the refrigerator nonetheless. When I fell asleep, and the family with the dark hair and dark eyes woke into existence, I showed them the drawings of my beautiful light-haired mama. This family eventually gravitated towards less accepting.

"Perhaps we should call Inoichi-san," my brother, only nine but already so tragically brilliant, murmured to my father. I gave my drawing a betrayed look. It was a surprisingly well-done rendition of my mama working at her computer (she was a professor), and I wondered with great innocence what I had done wrong.

"We'll wait a couple more weeks, just to make sure it isn't a phase," was my father's response.

Itachi had then taken my hand and asked if I'd wanted to play tag with him and Shisui. I never drew another picture of my family ever again. When I went to sleep that night, and woke up in my other life, I took the drawing down from the refrigerator and burned it in the backyard. There were definitely better ways to get rid of it, but in my mind, I'd wanted it to be _permanent_. I will admit-however-that watching crayon mother go up in smoke was quite a traumatizing experience for my young, impressionable soul.

It was at that moment in my life I discovered-from an objective viewpoint-my dreams were abnormal.

* * *

I excelled in school. It was to be expected, of course-a derivative of my duplicitous lifestyle-but it was almost despicable how easy academia opened herself up to me. My teachers _adored_ me: I was quiet, I was impeccably polite, my handwriting was neat, and my fingers were never sticky. My childlike politesse was where the similarities between my lives ended-from there on out the two diverged with ardor: In my childhood on Earth I drove with my mama to and from school, won piano competitions, and learned how to calculate the area of a circle _pi 'arr' squared_. Contrariwise, days in the Elemental Nations were spent in supervised sparring, learning how to kill a man without making noise, and washing dried bloodstains out of my older brother's military fatigues with my mother gently _tsk-tsk_ -ing at my side.

My papa rarely was home. He was a touring violinist for the _Berliner Philharmoniker_ , and when he did come home, it was with a carry-on full of trinkets from Shanghai, Tokyo, and New York. He practiced for hours on end in our living room, and I would sometimes play along, clacking out simple countermelodies on the baby grand, blushing when mama took a break from marking her student papers to applaud our antics.

"Try to sneak us tickets," I said into my papa's chest, letting the tears I'd been holding back soak into his Burberry scarf. We were at the airport.

Papa pulled away and wiped at my tears with the downy cashmere, "I'll only be gone two months, and you'll have front-row seats when I get back. Okay, Magda?" I saw him off at the gates, perched atop my mama's hip, waving and giggling as he made-pretend that his conductor was frog marching him onto the plane.

My other father was distant and aloof, but he was still a father figure. I made it a point to sleep early each night whenever papa was away for work. Father was mostly frustrated, the rest dismayed, at my periodic bouts of clinginess, but I suspected he was as delighted with the attention as I was. That did not loosen his resolve when I bugged him and mother to buy a professional upright piano for me-and oh boy, did I bug. But, in the end, I was a spoiled child whose parents had too much money, and my success saw a beautiful mahogany upright with glittering keys lounging against the east wall of our living room.

I suppose the addition of a second piano widely attributed to my victories in all my youth competitions. I was considered talented, and talented did I get fast. I played constantly during the day, and then when I went to sleep, I played again to rice paper walls and low-lying tea tables. And occasionally, to my brother.

Itachi would pull up cushions and sit beside me when I practiced, his eyes wide with curiosity. I never played anything amazing-mostly pieces that my piano teacher on earth gave to me-but sometimes I would fumble over melodies of my own creation. My original works were lightly considered _dismal failures_ : the tempos were too drab, the time signatures virtually nonexistent, and I had a penchant for hammering away at accidentals while laughing in delight. I drifted towards jazz freestyles, and then torturous atonal, before cringing and flowing back into Chopin's easier pieces.

Itachi liked staring at my face with great intensity whenever I played. I found this slightly disconcerting-people generally enjoyed looking at the hands of a pianist-but he was family, so I let it slide.

"You're a good player," Itachi had said once, just back from a mission and still in his flak jacket. In response, I scooted over and patted the empty side of the piano bench. He sat down very gingerly.

"Thanks," I chirped, leaning my head against his upper arm. He smelled like oil and smoke. Gross.

He hesitated, and then continued, "Where do you get all the ideas for your music?"

With sudden guilt, I remembered that none of the pieces I played existed in the Elemental Nations. Sure, I played music native to that world sometimes, but they never sung to me as tantalizingly as the music on earth did. "The melodies come to me in my dreams," I replied, frowning, and added (mostly as a distraction), "I'll write one for you."

It worked, and Itachi beamed an immeasurably happy smile at me. His smiles had the effect of being slightly confounding. Without realizing it, I think, he placed a hand on the keys and attempted to mimic a glissando I'd played earlier. I made at face at the mission grime and redder things encrusted around his cuticles.

Itachi immediately noticed my discomfort, and shot to his feet, looking incredibly desolate. "I'm sorry," he muttered, and walked away. I heard the shower being turned on.

To assuage the uncomfortable feelings of self-reproach, I banged on the piano the tune of La Marseillaise, loudly and with one finger, until mother came down and yelled at me.

Back on earth, I decided, on a whim, to pick up viola. Papa was extremely supportive of this choice, despite the pained looks mama shot him during the first few months of my endeavour. I learned how to ride a bike without training wheels, chattered over the phone to my papa in Cantonese, and belted out German operas with my mama while she cooked. In school, I read books _auf Englisch_ and the romantic languages; at home I watched Japanese war dramas.

"I don't understand why you enjoy those horrible films," papa complained to me. I could hear the sounds of cacophonous warm-ups over the tinny phone speaker. "The Japanese killed all of your grandmother's sisters when they invaded Hong Kong."

I made a noise of dissent. "I'm learning the language," I said stubbornly, scowling something fierce at the phone receiver. That was a lie-I was already fluent in it-but I needed a cover story on my knowledge for the future. I heard my papa heave a sigh, defeated.

"Magdalena," papa warned, and then his tone brightened, "have you tried the studies I emailed to your mother yet? They're pretty simple-I began with them when I first started playing as well. They're meant to build up resistance in your fingertips."

I glanced at my fingers, rubbed raw and bleeding from where I'd practiced with fervour, and, in retrospect, to the great chagrin of my mama. "Yes papa," I said, "I'll have them all mastered by the time you get back."

* * *

As seven years bled into eight, my brother started disappearing more and more frequently from the house, coming home sporadically and at odd hours in the night. Shisui committed suicide from stress. My room piled high with sheets of music I'd transcribed from earth. They lived taped to the windowsill and the sliding doors, their shy edges and corners poking out from under my bed. My hands were stained with black ink the day father brought me outside to the compound lake and coached me through the handsigns of the Grand Fireball jutsu.

I never managed to compose the piece I'd promised for my brother. He killed everyone and went rogue before I could finish it.

I'd come home very late that day. The Rice Country Orchestra had been playing in Konoha that night, and Itachi had gifted me tickets to go see them with a friend. When I finally returned to our clan compound, the new melodies buzzing in my mind crescendoed to a dissonant _fin_ at the sight of bodies on the street. I threw up. I ran to my house. I saw mother and father felled by his blade.

In an explosion of blind anger, I threw myself at Itachi with the intent to kill. He backhanded me viciously across the face, and I landed with a _whump_ next to the face of my mother. Her neck was open and dark blood was pouring out of the wound in two separate rivulets.

I couldn't help myself. I started crying-great, screaming sobs of fear and fury. I scrambled away from the dead bodies of my parents, dragging myself pitifully across the floor until I knocked my back into a wall. From there, I held my arms protectively in front of my chest. My fingers, usually shock-still and blessed with the control of that of a neurosurgeon, shook so hard I felt the vibrations in my stomach and behind my eyes.

Itachi gave me a moment to somewhat collect myself and then slammed me against the wall with a hand on my throat. The impact made stars appear in my vision, and my skull creaked ominously.

"Why," I managed to rasp out between tears and saliva. My hands scrabbled uselessly against his taut forearm.

"To test my ability, Sasuke," Itachi's eyes were demon-red, redder than the fresh blood on the floor, and the mutated pinwheels in them spun counterclockwise. I was mesmerized; I was terrified.

The world around me inverted and shed its colour, and I was left staring at a red moon, swollen in the prime of her lunar phase.

"Welcome to the world of Tsukuyomi," Itachi's voice whispered in my ears. Scenes of killing unfurled around me. "For the next seventy-two hours, your reality will be completely under my control."

 _Segno_

I blinked and woke up screaming to the pink walls of my girlish bedroom back on earth. Mama rushed into the room and attempted to gather me in her arms, but I hit at her with my elbows and knees until she let go.

"It's just a nightmare, Magda! You had a nightmare," her hand reached out to tentatively stroke my hair, but I flinched away violently at the gesture. I _never_ had nightmares-I didn't dream, period. Every moment in my life was a waking moment; sleep was a foreign concept to me.

Mama's voice was thick and lispy and there was _more blood_ going _drip-drip-drip_ from a split lip l'd caused. I didn't stop screaming, and eventually mama wrestled me into the car and drove me to the hospital, muttering nonsense about dreams and night terrors the whole way there.

The nurses at the ED tied down my thrashing limbs and slid a needle into the muscle of my left bicep. I fought valiantly against the oncoming unconsciousness-purposely breaking several of my own fingers in my frenzied effort to stay awake. Inevitably, I lost, and I woke up again in the black-and-red world of Tsukuyomi.

Open necks. Black blood and red eyes. Death. Bile.

I jerked awake to the fluorescent lighting of the ED. A pair of defibrillator pads ascended away from my chest. It took me all of three seconds to start desperately screaming again, and the familiar prick of a needle registered in my other arm.

Opennecksblackbloodandredeyesdeathbile.

Fluorescent lights.

"I'm sorry," a doctor was saying to mama. She looked at the doctor as if she considered him to be the devil himself. "Every time we induce unconsciousness she panics and goes into cardiac arrest."

My throat felt as if it was on fire, and I tasted iron every time I breathed in. I gurgled out another scream. It was much weaker, but it left my throat in a fiery agony for minutes afterwards.

Mama held her face close to mines. Her blonde hair was messy from sleep, and her sky-grey eyes were blinking too fast. I shuddered from head to toe, grounded by her familiarity-I barely even noticed the third needle that pierced my thigh.

Almost immediately I was hit with a sense of dulled joy. My previous fear had been scrunched into a miniscule singularity somewhere at the back of my brain. In this state of mind I stayed until a very nice lady pulled up a chair next to my hospital bed and introduced herself as my psychiatrist friend Lisa.

She asked what had happened. Tearfully and incoherently, I blubbered on and on about my second family, about my murderous brother Itachi, and about the scenes of death I saw every time I closed my eyes. Lisa smiled at me, patted my cheek, and then told me that everything was going to be okay. She then had a very long talk with my mother.

Mama drove me home with a forced smile on her face. I didn't go to school that day. She made bacon and sausages for breakfast, and then we ordered delivery for lunch and dinner in between watching silly Disney movies on the couch together.

Come night, I refused to go to sleep. I laid in bed, pulling at my freshly bandaged fingers, forcing myself to stay awake with periodic twinges of pain. I knew that the moment I closed my eyes I would be greeted with gore and death.

I didn't go back to school for the next day, either. The week that followed saw me passed through a flurry of psychiatrist's offices. By the time I reached fourteen days with no sleep, I hallucinated with each waking hour and my limbs felt as if they were constantly ploughing through molasses. My dark-haired mother with her slit neck ghosted around the edges of my vision, reaching out to me with bloody hands. Father sometimes appeared in the distance: stood at the end of a hallway or facing me as we drove past him on the sidewalk, his severed head cradled in his arms. Itachi's voice constantly whispered in my ears.

When I finally decided to tell my latest psychiatrist beau of my visions, I was immediately bundled up and shipped straight to a psychiatric hospital. _Psychosis_ , the social workers there whispered. _Schizophrenia_ was another popular buzzword. I was there for six unhappy months until I learned how to fake a recovery.

* * *

My new medication made the visual and auditory illusions disappear, so when I was discharged it was only with a harmless diagnosis of chronic insomnia. I slept once every couple of months, only when I could no longer hold it in, and each sleep saw me back in the hellish wastes of Tsukuyomi. When I returned home, I discovered-with a healthy dose of guilt and dismay-that papa had quit his job to take care of me and mama had developed stomach ulcers from stress.

As it turned out, chronic insomnia made a person extremely productive. Without the burden of sleep, I got my ARCM for piano, and then for viola, as well. I studied through the early hours of the morning without tire, ugly purple crescents carving themselves under my eyes. When I ran out of calculus problems to do and biology notes to make, I composed more atonal music that made my parents cringe and the neighbour's cat yowl.

Every time I blinked I saw the imprint of Tsukuyomi against the inside of my eyelids. I calmed myself down during panic attacks by quietly damning Itachi under my breath. My parents grew to believe I'd converted to religion-they misinterpreted my Japanese mumblings as praying.

It was to nobody's surprise when I graduated high school a whole two years early, and then moved to Manhattan to study music at Juilliard. It was also to nobody's surprise, when, at the age of nineteen, I quietly hanged myself in my New York apartment. _Al coda_.

* * *

I woke up with my back pressed against the wall and Itachi's hand around my throat. White stars sung across my vision and my skull creaked ominously.

Itachi let me drop to the floor. I sat there, in shock, staring at my hands-small, pale, and deathly still. My neck was already blooming into an opulent blue bruise and Itachi was saying something about vengeance and hatred and weakness; I registered none of it.

"Please kill me," I begged, not daring to meet his eyes. Partly out of shame, but mainly out of fear of another round of Tsukuyomi. " _Please._ "

Itachi knelt down in front of me and snapped my radius into two pieces.

"Coward," he spat, as I instinctively curled around my broken arm. "Hate me! _Detest me!_ Live a wretched, miserable existence-run, run, and cling on to life."

The irony of Itachi's last statement nearly sent me into hysterical laughter. _I've been doing exactly that for the past eleven years_ , I wanted to yell at him, but I feared that if I opened my mouth I'd break into a maniacal smile. Instead, I bowed my head, and my shoulders shook with suppressed mirth. Let him think I was crying.

"May you burn in the ninth circle of Hell," I muttered, already feeling myself calm down, "Damn your soul and your existence. You deserve nothing better than the love of the Devil. Lord of the Flies, take this accurst man into your arms." My eyes were scrunched closed and my hands were poised readily over them. I was prepared to pluck my own eyes out if it promised I would never visit the World of Tsukuyomi ever again.

Itachi exhaled through his nose. It was a grotesquely angry sound: uneven, phlegmy, and it broke in the middle. I heard his sandals scuff against the wooden floor, and when I opened my eyes, he was gone.

* * *

I passed out. I awoke in a hospital room.

My throat felt as if I'd swallowed acid, and when I brought my hands up to rub at it I was met with frightful purple swelling. I cleared my throat, and wheezed in a laborious breath. Had my roommate come home early from work and found me? Did I not die? I stumbled my way toward the window, desperate for a view of the calming New York skyscrapers-I snapped open the blinds-squinted against the sudden harsh light-and I was met with a view of the Hokage Mountain.

God almighty. They kept me in the hospital for a couple days, or weeks. I wasn't sure. I was slept most of that time- _real sleep_ , with nonsensical dreams and everything-and when the doctors finally decided I wasn't going to spontaneously up and off myself Inoichi-san walked me back to my house.

"Are you sure you're alright?" Inoichi looked nothing like my mother. His voice was foreign.

I gave a placid smile and nodded.


	2. Chapter 2: Solo a prima vista

I dropped out of the academy. Not because I didn't like it-no, no, I was fine with the murder-lessons they taught there-but because I wanted to have more time to sleep. Now that I'd had a taste of what it felt like: blissful darkness and addicting stretches of mindlessness-better than any drug I'd tried on Earth-I couldn't get enough of it. I slept from dawn till dusk, and then in the timeless tranquility of the night I scribbled down transcription after transcription from earth.

 _Soli_

I wrote them down because I didn't want to forget them. Music had been my only refuge during my decade-long stint of insomnia and many other mental pathologies. Don't get me wrong-the process was agonizing, not to mention relentlessly monotonous. Writing tonal music made my eyes glaze over from boredom and my scalp crawl in impatience; nonetheless I dutifully scribed pieces each night until my vision doubled and I crawled back into bed with migraines. My fingers bristled with an unending sense of urgency-a feeling akin to the itch you got when a knuckle failed to crack. My mind was full of knuckles and bones. I _had_ to write them down. Before I forgot. Before I broke all my fingers in my carnal impetus. I worked from favourites-down: first-Dvorak's Requiem, and then the Leningrad Symphony by Shostakovich. _La Campanella_ , Chopin's Ocean Etude, Holst's _Planets_. _Crack-crack-crack-crack-crack_.

The Hokage knocked on my door eight weeks after I'd decided to stop going to the academy. I answered it, shamelessly rubbing sleep out of my eyes at four in the afternoon, and invited him in for a pot full of my favourite oolong tea. He looked at me with undisguised concern over the top of his teacup.

I knew I looked bad. Deranged. Neurotic, even. My hands were stained ink-black and I'd developed a habit of massaging my neck during panic attacks. Dark claw marks scratched up and down my throat as a result. I'd fallen asleep over my work last night, and a mirrored version of the 62-note _gliss_ in the 201st bar of Liszt's Mephisto Waltz contoured the bottom of my left cheekbone. We talked for a bit about the upcoming October Festival and my music before the Hokage switched to more serious topics.

"Iruka has told me that you've dropped out of the Academy," the Hokage said, "I'd initially wanted you to heal and decide to return on your own, but I don't think that's happening."

I nodded my head and pretended like I was considering his words.

The Hokage came around the table and knelt down next to me. I turned to face him.

"Sasuke, please go back to school," he said, taking both of my black hands in his.

I nodded again, "Okay."

The Hokage looked like he'd expect much more resistance, but quickly changed his expression to that of a proud smile. "Good boy," his grip tightened on my hands. He left very shortly after that-I supposed he'd had places to be.

* * *

I didn't go back to school. The Hokage showed up at my house again a week later, with the jonin commander in tow, and he was a lot less nice that time.

"The Sharingan is the most powerful bloodline limit Konoha has ever had,"

He hadn't even bothered to seat himself, and instead stared me down from across the living room. Shikaku looked very grim at his right-hand side.

"It is your duty to the village to learn how to use it. _You_ are solely responsible for keeping Konohagakure safe from threats like Itachi. _Don't you want to kill Itachi?_ "

I stared at my black, grimy hands as I considered my answer. I thought about the years I'd spent plagued with visions of open necks and red blood. I thought about my father's severed head and my mama's stomach ulcers. I thought about my death.

"Yes," I decided, "I want to skin him alive." But I could learn how to do that later-maybe in a couple of years, after I'd finished all of my transcriptions.

The third time they came back I didn't even answer the door.

* * *

There was a week of blessed silence after that. In celebration, I took a break from tonicity and worked on creating a memory-perfect version of Schoenberg's Piano Concerto. Ah, twelve-tone. You are the bread to my butter.

* * *

A man broke into my house in the middle of the night, seven days after the Hokage's last (attempted) visit. I jerked up from the throes of screeching oboe noises as he stepped quietly through my front door, its lock demolished. He introduced himself as Shimura Danzo, and told me to pack a bag, as I'd be going on a very long training trip with him. I immediately dug my heels into the floor, scowling deeply.

"No," I insisted. I threw a kitchen knife at him when he started walking towards me. There was a flash of dull pain-and nothing more.

* * *

In ROOT you trained fourteen hours a day, and every other night was spent in a four-hour class on torture and interrogation. You lived deep underground in a complex where the temperature was constantly at an ambivalent 30 degrees Celsius. You were forced to go by a new name.

I went by the name _Mneme_ and was beaten each time I referred to myself as 'Sasuke'. Mealtimes were a strict fifteen minutes long each and the food was protein-rich and tasteless. After a week my muscles stopped aching with every movement, and the scrapes on my hands gave away to calluses. The bruises on my limbs grew less frightening in intensity as soft flesh hardened into wiry strength.

"How was your day, little brother?" A kid, around my age, with delicate, girlish features sat down across from me at dinnertime. He flashed a dimpled smile, nothing but patience insinuated in the motion.

I took my time chewing and swallowing my steamed fish-I was positively _starving_ -before crossing my ankles defensively. "Go away," I muttered, not meeting his eyes.

Sai's expression crumpled into genuine sadness. I felt mildly guilty for bullying an eight-year-old kid, so I glared holes into my brown rice until he left. He did that with a clutter of dishware, and when I exited the cafeteria to get to T&I class early, his blond friend gave me a dirty look.

Once a day, before dawn, I was ushered into a sterile, white-walled room with a hospital bed in the center and an army green machine stood sentinel next to it. I was strapped down, anaesthetized, and electric currents were run through my body until my jaw locked and lights flashed alarmingly in my vision. When the seizures ended, the doctor's assistant, Kabuto, carried me back to my room and hand-fed me apple slices. I'm sure the gesture was meant to comfort me, but those were the same hands that had taught me how to pry off someone's fingernails with maximum pain. I ate obediently and with great unease.

I only saw Danzo-sama once during my stay at ROOT. He waved me into his on-site office as Kabuto and I stepped out of the white room together. Kabuto settled me down comfortably in the chair across from Danzo's desk, bowed deeply, and slipped out through the door.

One of Vivaldi's allegros was clutched between Danzo's gnarled fingers. He tilted the page to show me the notes, as if I didn't have all of them already ingrained into my memory.

"You write beautiful music," he complimented.

"Thank you."

Danzo continued reading over the music with an approving look in his eye. "Have you ever considered specializing in auditory genjutsu? One of your brothers, Sai, has recently developed his paintings into his own ninjutsu." His lighthearted tone conveyed an order rather than a suggestion. "With your natural talent you'd be formidable."

"Formidable…?" my Japanese vocabulary had deteriorated over the years.

"Unstoppable. Terrifying. The best of the best."

"Uh," _No thanks._ "No thank you."

When I came back to my room that night, all my pens were gone and my precious sheet music lay in a pile of ashes on the middle of the floor. They discovered me before the stool I'd used to kick off of even had time to finish its fall, and there was barely a bruise around my neck when Kabuto cut down the noose. As a punishment, I was no longer given anaesthesia before my rounds of electroshock therapy.

Kabuto clucked his tongue in disappointment as I curled into a ball and tried to calm down my racing heartbeat. He peeled the electrodes from my temples. Reflexively, I caught the apple he threw at my head, and never attempted hang myself again.

* * *

Some months later, Kabuto fished me out from the cave-systems of ROOT and I was brought to the Hokage's office. The Hokage gave me a box of apple juice and made it _very clear_ that my future was either ROOT or the Academy.

I went back to the fucking Academy. Not happily, mind you-I rarely came to class and my enthusiasm was sub-zero-zilch. I showed up only for tests and to hand in assignments. Out of spite, I ensured that I was always at the top of the class regardless of my atrocious attendance. On the intermittent days I actually turned up for lectures-mostly to meet minimum attendance requirements-I passed time working through all of Johann Pachelbel's languid chamber music, eyes half-mast and hands half speed. Shikamaru, who sat next to me, liked to shift his head and press his ear against the table so that he could listen to the soft _scritch-scritch_ of my pen when I wrote.

One day I finished _Canon in D_ and placed it next to his semi-asleep head. "This makes me think of you," I explained, "You should have it." Shikamaru thanked me and stared at it for a very long time.

I didn't show up at school again until end-of-the-year exams. Shikamaru finished his exam early, like me, and stopped me before I left with a hand on my forearm. "My mother really liked your _Canon_ ," he told me.

I wrinkled my nose. "What about you?"

"What about me?"

"Did you like it, too?"

"It made me fall asleep."

That was good enough for me. "Cool," I said, and then asked him if he wanted to come over for tea and judge my piano pieces.

* * *

I graduated from the Killing Academy a semester later. The exam had been depressingly slow-going, so I bought myself a grand piano in celebration. Now I had two pianos in my house, and I thought they looked quite happy together.

I didn't recognize any of my teammates. I actually didn't recognize most of my classmates-Shikamaru was the only person whose name I knew.

My sensei arrived three hours late and then demanded of us to share our lifelong dreams with one another. "My name is _Mnem_ -" I flinched, hard, at the memories of ROOT, "My name is Uchiha Sasuke," I corrected, "I like… I like visiting the Konohagakure Temple and listening to the monks sing. I dislike brown rice. My hobby is writing. My dream for the future is to be happy."

My teammates were… real pieces of art. Sakura was loquacious, passionate, and warlike. Naruto was daring, honorable, and tenacious. Kakashi was eccentric and plainly starved of love. I saw it in the way he was always on edge, always positioning himself to avoid accidental contact with other humans, how he, in his stoic confidence, opted to shift his body language away from every person he was addressing. The first thing he did with our team was give us a psychological test on our loyalty. I had no intention of passing it, but then I thought of how annoying the Hokage would be if I decided to throw my career and spend a lifetime as a genin. Team 7 became officially registered.

It took Sakura an alarmingly short time to develop a crush on me. I caught her several times staring at me in the breaks between spars and during our mindless D-rank missions. She waited two weeks, as if to assure herself of the commitment, and then threw her attentions on me full-force. My other teammates treated this with anger and sadistic amusement, respectively. You can guess what applied to whom.

Once, after three rounds of one-on-one sparring (which was dubiously supervised by Kakashi-sensei), Sakura offered to sharpen my weapons for me. I agreed, because, _free labor_ , and I hated sharpening knives-my hands could always be doing something so much better; more creative; more valuable. She managed across one of Liszt's Etudes-the one with three lines of notes that I'd won my college tuition with-balled up and discarded at the bottom of my weapons pouch. Her green eyes widened in amazement at the impressive slew of notes spilling across the paper, and she turned to look at me with a flush.

"You write music, Sasuke-kun?" she asked breathlessly, fluttering her eyelashes in excitement, or anticipation, or avariciousness.

"Mainly symphonic, sometimes piano," I answered.

"Can you write me a song?"

Her dead-set expression revealed the volumes she'd go to for me to do exactly that. I knew that if I said no, she'd undoubtedly continue bothering me for a _very_ , _very_ long time.

"Alright." I scribbled out the _Aria_ from _The Magic Flute_ on the back of one of my dummy explosive notes. As Sakura peered eagerly over my shoulder, I tapped my pen on my chin, and then added some bastardized lyrics underneath.

"This was inspired by the sound of your voice," I explained, "It's a pretty difficult soprano vocal piece, so see if you can find someone trained to perform it for you."

Sakura accepted the sheet music, gave me the most eye-wateringly pleased smile I'd ever seen in my life, and said something about her aunt being a prima donna soprano for the Konoha Opera House. She walked home with a skip in her step, and then didn't show up to practice the next morning.

"Sakura was very hurt by what you did," Kakashi-sensei scolded me. "It's not very nice to make fun of things that people cannot change, especially their voices." She eventually did end up coming to practice, in the afternoon. When we sparred that day, her punches left bruises on my cheekbones and abdomen that didn't go away for weeks.

* * *

If D-ranks were painstaking and cruel, then C-ranks were painstaking and cruel wrapped up in pretty paper. I was beyond thankful when Kakashi-sensei entered us into the Chunin Exams and saved us from the monotony of genin imprisonment. Upon re-examination, deciding to pass Kakashi's crackpot teamwork test had been probably one of the best decisions I'd made in my life. A lifetime in the genin corps, pulling nothing but C's and D's… No, thank you.

During the second phase of the exam, a woman who called herself 'Orochimaru' knocked out my two teammates and then approached me. In response, I threw my team's heaven scroll at her feet and told her to fuck off.

"Uchiha Sasuke, right? I assume you're not at all interested in gaining power?"

I shook my head.

Orochimaru hummed in thought, "I run a village in the Land of the Rice Paddies," she continued, "It's called Otogakure-The Sound Village. I'm sure you've heard of it before."

Yes, I had heard of Otogakure before. The ninja there wore cute headbands with music notes on them and were famous for their auditory-based jutsu. This I told Orochimaru.

"Otogakure-as you already know-has the finest musicians the Elemental Nations can offer. Our philharmonic and opera troupes go on world tours and are widely regarded as the best at their craft. I'm extending to you a formal invitation to join Oto and become our City Composer."

I blinked, taken aback. That hadn't been what I was expecting, at all. Slowly, I rubbed the side of my neck, considering my options. I'd have to defect from Konoha and become a missing-nin-ninja weren't permitted to emigrate out of the country. That was fine, I was _more_ than willing to do that. Freelancing would keep me in Konoha, but it sounded too stressful to pursue, what with my current career. My hands were clean, save from a sparse scattering of forest grime, so they left no marks on my throat when I removed them. I stared at them, inexplicably surprised by their appearance, thinking about electroshock therapy and the _sch-sch-sch_ chewing apple slices.

"Great!" I decided, "When do I start?"

Orochimaru grinned down at me, and returned the heaven scroll. "I'll come get you in two months or so," she winked, patting me on the cheek.

The Hokage summoned me into his office again once he heard that I'd made it to the Tournament phase of the exams. He gave me a cup of bitter jasmine tea and my first professional commission.

"I want you to write a march for Konohagakure. A nationalistic fanfare-something big, flashy, and grand. Something to show off to our foreign guests before the tournament," he said.

I smiled a toothy smile, immediately and genuine. "I'm gonna need cannons, and I want to speak with the high lama of the Konoha Temple. I want a choir, too, a full one-and I want to hand-pick all the singers." If I was going to leave this village, then I was going to do so with a _bang_.

* * *

Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture was a killer performance-not literally, unfortunately-but it certainly gave some people lifelong blood pressure problems. The crowd's reaction when the cannons started firing (high arcs into the surrounding forests) at the climax of the piece had been priceless and exhilarating. Konoha Temple had then, madly and artlessly, rung all of her bells-something that made the entire village shake in its foundation-the trumpets sang their absolving note-cannons fired one last time, in unison-and the stadium exploded into hysterical applause.

Shikamaru gave me a funny look when I returned to the competitor's box. "Reminds me of my mom," he told me, the same time Naruto yelled " _Kick-ass!_ " into my ear.

* * *

My opponent liked to wear heavy eyeliner and had the kanji for 'love' tattooed above his left brow bone. He had red hair, small slanted eyes, and was absolutely nuts. Before our fight he raved on and on about his hobby as a serial killer and then started telling me about his dead mother. I half-expected him to thumb his ears and stick his tongue out at me by the time he'd finished his loopy tirade. Unsurprisingly, he didn't do that. Instead his body exploded outwards in a wave of broiling sand, and he turned into the Demon Tanuki.

There wasn't much for a genin to do in terms of fighting during the subsequent invasion, so I hung back for a bit and then left for the civvie sector to help with evacuation. The Tanuki crushed the stadium. A giant, three-headed snake pretty much demolished the entire financial center, completely changing the city skyline. Konoha Crush, indeed.

The Hokage's funeral was a welcoming break from hair-raising humdrum of post-invasion cleanup. Picking human bodies out of rubble (and one on memorable occasion, just the scattered fingers of an unfortunate soul) made my hands tremble and my heart beat _con incalzando_. Oftentimes I would sit down, off to the side, and watch my teammates bag and seal dead after dead with unshaken calm. I wondered what was wrong with me, and the Queen of the Night laughed her shrill laugh inside my head. Everyone I saw at the funeral wore black: black legs, black torsos, black collared necks. I wore white. On that day, in that sea of mourning, I was a speck of undyed silk, standing out through the crowd. I was a cabbage butterfly drowning in my own inkpot, and I found that quite fitting.

* * *

Itachi appeared back into my life with the stubborn _ching-ching_ of an onbeat tambourine: memorably, unnoticed at first, but constantly driving the music forward. The first sly beat was Kakashi-sensei, lying comatose in the critical ward. I stood at the foot of his bedside, my mind racing in the newfound knowledge of Itachi hunting the teammate who'd just left the village. Then, there was no thinking-suddenly the world went _a tempo_ and I was racing after him, desperate to see him.

Itachi's back was to me when I saw him at the motel. He was wearing a black and red cloak. There was another man stood at his shoulder, taller and brute-faced. Naruto gaped his mouth and threw his gaze between Itachi and I, back and forth, back and forth; I paid no mind to this.

"It's been awhile, Sasuke."

I didn't respond, instead choosing to marvel at the fantastic fury coursing through my veins. How was it possible that one person could cause so much pain in my life? To leave me wrecked, damned, and dead? I approached Itachi as one might approach a new instrument: voraciously, with hands begging for a feel, clumsy and amateurishly.

"Itachi-" A flurry of movement.

He hit me in the chest. My breath went out in a violent _huff_. Elbow to the stomach, knee under the jaw-I reached out to touch his face-and Itachi broke my wrist. The pain was familiar and meant that I was awake and not dreaming. At the end of it all, I was pinned by my neck against the wall.

I kept my gaze lowered, staring at Itachi's Adam's apple. His breathing was harsh against my face, hot with anger more than physical exertion.

"Why won't you fight back!?" he demanded. "Why do just stand there and let me hit you- _why don't you want to kill me?_ "

Itachi was wrong. I wanted to kill him more than anything in the world-if it meant destroying my own world to have him dead, I'd do it with a leap of faith.

"I could never kill you," I said, "You're my muse."

Itachi made a shaky, frustrated sound. "Look me in the eyes," he ordered, "I want you to look me in the eyes and tell me that."

No Tsukuyomi. No Tsukuyomi. No Tsukuyomi. " _No Tsukuyomi,_ " I begged. Itachi hesitated, and then nodded once, short and final.

I dragged my eyes up to meet his, and Itachi, because he was a fickle bastard, sent me plunging into a world of black and red. "Welcome to the world of Tsukuyomi," his voice whispered in my ears. "For the next seventy-two hours, your reality will be completely under my control."

 _Dal segno al coda_

I awoke in a hospital. My throat burned like acid, and when I ran my hands up and down it, I was met with a painful, swollen ring of purple. I staggered my way towards the window, desperate for the comforting image of the Hokage Mountain-snapped open the blinds-and was met with a view of the New York skyscrapers.

I was still standing in front of the windows when my mother came into the room. I only noticed her being there because she screamed, and then dropped the vase of flowers she'd been holding. _Crash_.

A week. I'd been in a coma for a week. My roommate had come home early and found me dangling from the ceiling. A week. Four years awake, one week asleep. I was alive, again, and everytime I closed my eyes I saw open necks and black blood. Again.

* * *

Insomnia came back to me like an old friend, but this time I greeted her with a lover's embrace. Mama's stomach ulcers returned from the stress of my attempted suicide, and then a year later those stomach ulcers turned into cancer. I missed my own graduation-Bachelor of Music with Honors-because I was at my mother's deathbed.

"Go," she urged me, I holding one hand and father holding the other, "Go back to your other mother. She'll be there for you now." Mama swallowed-my eyes were instinctively drawn to the motion-and when I looked at her face next she was dead.

Papa fell to the bottle, and then felled himself off of a bridge. Now I had no one.

 _Solo_

I wrote my thesis, _An analysis on the evolution of Romantic and 20th Century era notions of variational atonality_ , and got a Ph.D. in music at the age of twenty-three. Then, because my fingers still itched for more, I wrote _The psychoacoustic and psychophysical mechanisms applied in religious music across cultures_ , and tucked away another Doctorate in Psychology of music. After that I stopped actively pursuing doctorates because universities started giving them to me for free. A . from Cambridge; another one from Oxford. T.U.M., Humboldt-academia was weird, not that I was protesting their generosity.

I don't remember exactly when I developed my own style of composition. All my life had been a slew of half-assed original writings and then mindless transcriptions without foreseeable end. There'd been a gradual grey area where I'd transgressed from transcribing, to listening to other people's music and writing countermelodies to it, and then eventually building those countermelodies into their own distinct pieces. Atonality had always been my Siren's Song, so it was inevitable when my concerts started attracting old men in Hermes Paris jackets and young rich hipsters with metal studding entire constellations across their faces.

I was the warmonger who governed a country of conforming peasants. I was the gunslinger that lead a travelling bandit camp in the wild west. Tsukuyomi ruled my life, and my heart orbited in a tight, dangerous circle around it. I wrote entire symphonies in undertone serii, my audience squirming in their seats at the wrongness of the sound, never once noticing that the fundamental notes leading the melodies were missing the entire time. That was the thing about human psychology-the explicit is never need. Given enough exposure to the implicit-like introducing melodies sub-harmonically-the brain would always, without fail, interpolate your missing note, your subliminal desire, and fill your empty lungs with water.

I took this idea of psycho-auditory hallucination and wrote my first and only silent symphony. Consisting of twenty-odd subcontra- and hyper-bass instruments, I commanded them to play solely at pitches too low to be decipherable to the human ear. We played mostly at _fort-issi-issi-issimo_ , and our music made the air tremble and quake. I experimented with shepard tones, decided I fucking loved them, and then squeezed them into the silence. On the debut of my _Tich_ _á_ _Sinfonietta_ , people arrived at the concert hall curious-and left in an ugly miscellany of emotion. The shepard tones created an illusion of a constantly rising bassline-a sound desperately clawing its way into human perception-but the expectation never succeeded itself. It left my following of old men and hipsters rooted to their seats; their chests vibrating in tune to my music. The entire concert hall had been hallucinating notes in distress by the end of it all-I was sure of it-for I'd engineered my machine perfectly.

Sometimes I combined the two-my hell-blessed undertones with hyperbass mixed in-and people left my concerts _furious_. Reviews after those nights were always fun to read-the critics could never seem to agree on whether or not my central melodies ascended or descended in pitch (jokes on them; they were all tritone paradoxes.) Some called me the Christ-killer, and my musical masterpieces were often compared to sub-human suffering.

I thought it meant something good if my music inspired such imagery in others. I'd lived an entire life with songs on my sleeves and notes knotted around my neck-good, evil, younger brother, older brother-those things meant nothing but enlightenment to me. I was writing the best music of my life, and I had no one to tell it to.

What was living, if not a lurching, unpracticed solo stretching into infinity? My infinity-my future-looked to be decades of consciousness, Tsukuyomi under my eyelids, and then dissatisfying death. I walked briskly towards the epicenter of the suspension bridge. Briskly was how I did everything nowadays: confident, with rationale, and never regretting.

Five or so kilometers downriver I could clearly make out the seafoam huddled against the adjacent beachfront. The expanse was blinding, and stretched north and south as far as the eye could see. My body would undoubtedly wash up there, waterlogged and foam-covered, and certainly _very_ dead. I threw off my leather jacket in one smooth motion-and then I leapt from the bridge without breaking stride. My hands trailed through the air beside me as I fell: free, jubilant, and pale. In this pose I stayed, my arms orthogonal to my torso, until I went under the water. My spine snapped in a scatter of sixteenths and I opened my eyes to see-

 _Coda_

-Itachi's Mangekyou Sharingan. His hands-pale like mine-were still around my neck, but I was tall enough that my feet touched the floor, so it didn't really hurt. He was blinking very fast, in short, wild bursts, and for a second he looked so much like my mama it hurt.

" _Tell me,_ " Itachi begged, but I only heard the sound of a violin being practised in a living room. "Look me in the eyes _and tell me!_ "

I raised my right hand and finally touched the side of Itachi's face. His skin was surprisingly soft and even, save for a rumble of forgotten stubble gracing his jawline. My hands were the instrument of instruments, and Itachi was my transcendental etude. I traced a thumb over the purple crescents under his eyes; I'd had those too, once upon a time. Belatedly, I registered his crying: two lines of tears, scarring his cheeks with grief. His face suddenly became very prominent. I saw nothing but his face. It was as if his head was separate from the rest of his body.

And so I said: "You're the only family I have left. I will never be able to kill you,"

 _Poco a poco morendo_

"None of us will ever be Abel."

 _Fine._


End file.
